Jean-Michel Ross

Jean-Michel Ross’s curatorial practice questions the spatial relationship and interaction between objects and subjects. He creates different contexts through fiction and narration to build dialogue with artists and interact with their works. His projects often reflect upon hierarchy, freedom, universality, neutrality, equivalence and value. He believes that both conceptual esthetics and formal esthetics are equally fundamental to curatorial research. For him curating is and will always be a collaborative effort. Recently he has started to question the issues and empirical impossibilities raised by the democratic ideal, linking this political theory to the art field and to his curatorial and editorial practice.

Jean-Michel Ross is a Montreal based curator, critic, writer and collector. He completed an art history degree at Université du Québec à Montreal in 2004. He was assistant editor of Espace Sculpture Magazine for six years where he directed several thematic issues. His writings on contemporary art have been published regularly in Espace and C Magazine. In 2010 he curated the exhibition and residency project La Colonie, Deschambault-Grondine, Canada. In recent years he has also acted as co-curator for projects such as The Waterpod Project in 2009, New York; Québec Gold in 2008, Reims, France; and Jumelages in 2007, Montreal, Canada. He is the founder of Free Pass and has been on the board of Optica Gallery in Montreal since 2004.

Kakyoung Lee

Kakyoung Lee’s moving images are focused on the repetitive nature of personal daily life. The monotonous daily ritual is deconstructed and reconstructed in a fresh configuration in which nothing is the same and all things are in continuous flux. Lee combines hundreds of hand drawn images and prints to construct a moving image that reflects the sequence of activities in ordinary life and alludes to her search for her identity in the different geographic and cultural milieus through which she has passed in the travels between her two home countries, South Korea and the United States.

Kakyoung Lee (born 1975) works with moving images, prints, drawings, and installations. She received a BFA from Hong‐Ik University, Seoul, and a MFA from Purchase College, NY. Lee has exhibited widely in Korea and the United States including the Drawing Center; the Lower East Side Print Shop; the Queens Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Seoul Arts Center. Lee has participated in residencies at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, Brooklyn; Yaddo, Saratoga Springs; the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; the Lower East Side Printshop, New York; and the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, New York. Lee is a recipient of awards from the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2010), the Korea Arts Foundation of America Award for Visual Arts (2010), and the AHL Foundation Award in New York (2009). Lee’s works are in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Library of Congress, Washington D.C., among others.

Claire Fontaine

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based artist collective, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to develop a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box – as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes – there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.” Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.